


witches, wild animals, and other things inside our castle

by heartattacked



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Gen, HQ Brofest Rookie Tier, Prince and the Pauper AU
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-03
Updated: 2018-04-03
Packaged: 2019-04-07 16:36:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,376
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14085081
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heartattacked/pseuds/heartattacked
Summary: “Hey, ‘Samu,” says Atsumu, nudging the other boy’s elbow. “Do you love me?”





	witches, wild animals, and other things inside our castle

**Author's Note:**

> i wanted to make this bigger and better but writing has been hard lately and march wasn't kind in terms of energy levels etc. i hope you enjoy what little and very vague we have here thanks for reading. :')

Laugh lines, deep love lines, streaks of gold running through his hair, dimples, a few odd freckles.

 

Atsumu grows up with a crown on his head. Soft spirals of gold, spun in tandem with silver tourmaline and milky opal. Pretty, lightweight, practical. He likes it. It usually lays on a mannequin beside his bedside table, but occasionally (like now) he’ll put it on and stare at himself in the vanity. Sometimes he’ll make Osamu do it too, just for fun, to keep him on his toes. Osamu hates it. To him, Atsumu thinks, the crown might be a little too heavy.

 

☆.｡.:*　　.｡.:*☆

 

Worry lines, shallow life lines, tuffs of hair just as light as the moon when it’s new, a few odd freckles. Love lines, just as deep, if not deeper.

 

“Is it time?”

 

Osamu shuffles around the meticulously kept closet for his second best shoes. He passes the best-best pair, shined white leather with rosy-ink patterns of shapes like clouds lining the soles and laces, and doesn’t spare them a second glance as he grabs the others, brown and worn, comfortable and familiar, some holes (small, not noticeable, yet) leaking things like hopes, dreams, and summer memories from the heels.

 

Daichi sighs from the doorway. “Those again? They have holes.”

 

Osamu leans into the foot of his bed and ties the shoes tight.

 

“His ego doesn’t need any more boosting.”

 

“But maybe yours needs a little.”

 

☆.｡.:*　　.｡.:*☆

 

They sit on short stools, eyes locked, in a controlled mirror image of each other. Osamu thinks of a few uninteresting things—his bank, filling with gold, his boredom, and the unsettled blood in his gut, vibrating all the time when he's here in this room—and he doesn’t want to be here.

 

Atsumu raises a hand. Osamu raises a hand. Atsumu turns away. Osamu turns away. Atsumu holds three fingers up behind his back. Osamu holds up three fingers. Suna snickers in the background. A bird _t t t tings_ at the window. Atsumu goes to the window, none too delicately flicking the lock and flinging it open. The birds scatter, and Atsumu watches with something like longing. From the other side of the room, Osamu faces the opposing window and does the same, in the same timing, same expression filling up his worry lines, mimicking as though it weren't a mimic at all. One bird flies in, all blue and gold and fluttering. Air flows through the room, blowing the curtains wildly; light trickles in.

 

And with the one bird comes the rest and suddenly the room bursts into cacophony, Atsumu yelling and flailing around as the wrens peck and prod his hair. Osamu finally loses his composure. Suna sighs, leaving the two to themselves, knowing full well Osamu will have the birds out momentarily while the dear prince huddles tearfully in his bathroom.

 

“That still freaks me out,” says Ginjima from the corridor.

 

“Freaky twins.”

 

"Freaky _not_ twins."

 

Suna meets his eyes. "Definitely."

 

☆.｡.:*　　.｡.:*☆

 

Osamu isn’t his brother, not really. It’s hard to remember that, sometimes. Most of the time, he doesn’t have to worry about it, but occasionally Osamu will leave their small and far-between meetings and Atsumu will fall back onto his bed, rubbing the skin between his eyes, wondering what it would be like to be Osamu, to be good enough to stand in his shoes, to make his shoes and crush his medicine, but not really good enough, to go back home to a little box room with a tiny mattress shoved in the corner like an afterthought.

 

He'll rub the birthmark on his shoulder, hoping that maybe it's just a spot of dirt.

 

☆.｡.:*　　.｡.:*☆

 

The skies above Inarizaki are in a constant changing. Blues and violets, reds to match the rose gardens and grays to blend poppy seeds into the cobblestone paths. Clouds wrapping around each other, dissipating with sunrise and returning to cover the setting, and it all happens behind the backdrop of a castle on a hill and a village too small to be so cruel.

 

This is the view from Osamu’s window.

 

A few skeletons perch on the windowsill, little birds that eat out of the pores in the wood and drink the rainwater of the willow tree dangling over the view. Bones and tendons actually cover his entire room, but all he has to show for it is a pair of shoes he can’t wear and dust that no one bothers to sweep.

 

On the windowsill, there’s a stack of evenly lined marble (assembled as neatly as broken marble can be), a wood mortar (full of cracks and a fist-full of silver coins), and a thin tray lined from top to bottom with glass jars, labeled things like _オレガノ, バジル, アマチュア,_ and _activated charcoal_ , in English, because he was proud that he knew those words.

 

The skeletons stay there for varying stretches of time. The marble pieces have never moved, not since he was seven years old; the mortar only shuffles slightly when he reaches for a coin or two, and the jars of herbs and spices and minerals breathe nearly everyday, falling into his professional mortar for work.

 

Two things Osamu knows, as he delicately holds the pestle and presses apple cider vinegar into the cracks.

 

His first mortar and pestle had been given to him as a child in the castle kitchen, made with a soft blend of white and gray calacatta, ripples of gold in the rim. It had escaped his small fingertips like the notes of a piano that falls from a musician—slowly at first, and then all at once, hitting with the force of a thousand breaths, taken away.

 

The second he’d made himself in the shadow of his caretaker in the village. Wood from the fire-stack for winter, now turned to a simple basin and batter. It isn’t broken, not yet, and it has breathed life through many winters, but the cracks from dryness are evident in the way the vinegar soaks into its pores like rain filling a river.

 

He knows: things come in two ways: the first way, and the real way. Usually, the two don't hold hands, or mingle longer than necessary. Usually, the first sizzles out like sinking daylight and the other takes its place, smaller, but closer, heavier, solid and firm, knowing its place as the superior _thing_.

 

Osamu mumbles something into the wind coming in, an itch ticking away on his shoulder.

 

☆.｡.:*　　.｡.:*☆

 

Inarizaki, after the sun sets, recolors itself to whisper-gray and smooth, black velvet. Smooth, a bit too much so, and black, a bit lighter than it lets on.

 

Shadows dance around the town square fountain. The shops are closed for the evening, chairs up, signs tipped down, and life abandoned for thoughts of a home cooked dinner and bedtime stories. Abandoned all except one, and maybe a few more lurking behind corners.

 

When Hinata cleans, he cleans thoroughly.

 

This is, unfortunately, every night, and he’s usually here in the market plaza long past sundown, scrubbing velvet-black tile and bricks and cobblestone, in some part because he feels like he should, but mostly because he actually has to, to keep his license to play in the plaza.

 

Hinata dunks his rag into fountain, now half-empty and full of soap studs, and squeezes out the liquid onto a particularly dirty tile, crusted from a thousand shoes.

 

It’s dumb, he thinks, using his elbow to pull hair out his eyes, but he hears the voices coming through the cracks, the words staining him like the oil stuck to his boots. _Just beggar boy_ , begging for bronze with a guitar too large for his body and a harmonica? _You’ll at least clean the street you beg on._

 

Hinata abandons the rag for his own fingernails, already an unattractive color, and scratches hard between the tiles. Dirt, everywhere.

 

What could a beggar boy do with a guitar and a harmonica, spending his days playing rusty music and his nights killing dirt?

 

Hinata’s tongue hangs between his teeth and he sits back, wiping sweat away. The summer heat beats down on him, this new found night doing nothing to cool the air.

 

He thinks: maybe, someday, something.

 

☆.｡.:*　　.｡.:*☆

 

Osamu came to Inarizaki as a baby, wrapped in gauze and the color red, blood to mark a dark and dangerous journey. Somehow, he'd landed on the doorstep of a doctor's humble shop, and ever since he'd been living there in shoe closet for a bedroom. Daichi came a few years later as an apprentice, though no matter how close they'd grown as children, he could never unfold the mystery of where he'd come from either. Two children with a lost identity, happily living in shoe closets and mixing herbs to earn their stay.

 

Until the king paid a visit to their doorstep, and then all the puzzle pieces fell apart, melding together to form a completely different image.

 

Tonight, the knock on the door is rejected by Daichi, passed onto him with a wave of a hand as he pores over study material at the front desk. Osamu opens the door with full intention to briskly bite away a customer, but instead finds himself narrow eyed and biting his own tongue at Atsumu’s arrival.

 

Osamu checks to see if Daichi is still cast over in uninterested reading—and he is—before stepping out.

 

“Wow, you don’t usually frown this much when you see me— _mmpf_.”

 

Osamu grabs his hand and brings them behind the shop, his unlikely twin biting curses as he trips and whines. Atsumu would never have been permitted to leave the castle alone, and since he’s here now with cape over his shoulders and no accompaniment...Osamu, while not a naturally charitable person, couldn’t turn away a helpless prince with nowhere else to go.

 

☆.｡.:*　　.｡.:*☆

 

“Hey, ‘Samu,” says Atsumu, nudging the older boy’s elbow. “Do you love me?”

 

They sit on the windowsill, skeletons knocked away, somewhat huddled inside a blanket draped over their shoulders. The castle cuts a silhouette through stars and mountain tops, they both stare at that space, distaste rolling around in their mouths for different reasons.

 

Met with resigned silence, he keeps on, “I mean, we don’t really know each other that well. We’re not really...you know. But we’ve been together for a long time, and you’re the only consistency in my life, and I always want to see you more. You’re the only person I ever want to see. I wanna touch you and be close to you, like this because then I feel like you want to be with me too. And when you leave I miss you again and I feel like I can’t ever pull apart from you. It’s like. I love you, kinda. It's not dirty.”

 

The longer he rambles, the deeper something like sadness sinks into his throat, coating the back of every word in a way that feeds into Osamu’s heart. It’s been no secret that Atsumu harbors blackness and colorlessness somewhere inside him, but rarely does Osamu, or anyone, see it venture daringly to the surface.

 

“Why’re you here, ‘Tsumu?”

 

Atsumu stares down into twisting fingers, breathing slowly. He says, “Cap’n said I need to leave my room more.”

 

“Somehow...this probably isn’t what he meant.”

 

“I know!” the prince throws his head back. “ _I know._ But you don’t understand how much dirt is in the air. Kita cleans _allllll_ the time but it’s still so dusty and I can’t ever... _breathe_ there! You know how that Nohebi prince is here right now? He’s hogging all the oxygen I swear. And my dad has been hovering so much with his trip coming up—do you know about that? You never stay past our sessions to catch up anymore, so probably not. Anyway, it _sucks_.”

 

Osamu swings his arm around Atsumu’s shoulder, cutting him off, letting the younger of them sink into his side and tip his head onto his own shoulder. “You talk too much.”

 

“I know. But if I don’t—it all stays inside, and I don’t like that feeling, when it all jumbles and changes into I can’t hold onto anymore.”

 

“I’m not going to leave, if that’s what you’re worrying about. Nowhere to go, anyway.”

 

A sniffle and a sigh, and the two of them watch the stars murmur above them, winking to each other with wonder and unheard conversations.

 

“I know. Thanks.”

 

“Besides, I get paid to spend time with you.”

 

“ _'_ _Samu_. Mean.”

 

“Kidding, asshole.”

 

The stars quiet, but whispers and bubbles of laughter still pop with the occasional jab Osamu makes, and Atsumu knows there’s no where he’d rather be, like how the stars have nowhere to be except in the space above them, and how the space next to Osamu is the place he belongs.

 

The fall asleep sometime later, moon sinking dutifully to the horizon. When Osamu wakes, Atsumu is nowhere to be found, and someone is pounding on the door.

 

Kita Shinsuke, and some several angry looking attendants. He says what he came to say, and Osamu thinks, _Oh_ , moving in a daze back to his room with Daichi staring at him, gaping.

 

It’s a hard thing to look at, Atsumu laying in his bed, head peaking out just above the covers.

 

The grief in his eyes, lining the folds of his clamped mouth, gives it all away, and Osamu quietly grabs his shoes and tries hard to avoid his eye. To Osamu the prince thinks, _I did something bad_ , over and over, but he doesn’t move to change anything. After all, it’s what he wanted.

 

“Are you ready?” Kita asks as they load into the carriage.

 

Feeling a bit numb, he says, “Isn’t this what was supposed to happen?”

 

Kita smiles inwardly. “It's a bit tortuous, but I suppose you’re correct. We would not have you in our courts if we didn’t anticipate this happening.”

 

“How long ‘til you find him?”

 

“Hopefully not too long. Our guard began the search at sunrise. But either way, we have you for the time being. Congratulations, Osamu. We’re happy to have you, as you must be glad to finally be filling your role.”

 

“I…” Osamu twists his hands together, not a habit of his own. “Have been much happier with smaller things.”


End file.
